I swung again, striking home in the monster’s flank and squishing to a halt as if I’d hit a wall of jelly, the impact ringing dully in my hands. The huge pale body wrapped itself around the staff, like a human doubling over from a blow to the stomach.
I tried to pull away, but the iron was firmly stuck, and the toothed maw shot out toward me again. The extended mouth slashed past my legs, one stray tooth catching and ripping my jeans. I jumped straight into the air, stomping down on the appendage with one cowboy boot. My weight forced it to the ground, but its slick hide slipped out from under my foot, toppling me backward onto the tracks. The whole beast uncurled over me, rolling more of itself out from the tunnel to crush me.
Then Lace flashed into view, her iron stake slashing through the air and straight into the ring of teeth. At this contact the creature let out an earsplitting screech. The noise was metallic and grinding, like a sack of nails dumped into a wood-chipper. The beast twisted back, crashing against the subway wall, its bulk dislodging a shower of grit.
Lace pulled me to my feet as I yanked the iron staff free, both of us stumbling backward, certain we’d hurt the thing. But the grinding turned to a violent hissing, and a spray of metal shards shot out from its maw, battering us. The creature’s ring of teeth had rendered the iron into shrapnel, which it spat out like a rain of rusty coins. We fell to our knees, and I saw it rearing up again, a new set of teeth jumping out from its hide.
I raised up the iron staff and felt Lace’s hands join mine on the weapon.
“The rail!” she shouted in my ear, tugging at the iron. I didn’t have breath to answer, but I understood, and let her slide the butt of the weapon toward the edge of the track as the monstrous mass descended, impaling itself. Lace jumped away from the pole; I knew I should let go, but the murderous imperative that had filled me from the moment I’d smelled the creature kept my hands on the weapon, guiding it backward until it lodged firmly against the third rail.
A shower of sparks cascaded from the point of contact, the mad buzz of electrocution sweeping across my body, every muscle locked fast by the wild energies moving through me—enough juice to power a subway train. And yet, despite the pain, all I felt was the satisfaction that the worm, my age-old enemy, was feeling it too, glowing from inside, spiderwebs of red veins pulsing inside its glistening skin.
That pleasure lasted half a second; then Lace was pulling me away by my jacket, breaking my mortal grip on the iron staff. More sparks flew, but the beast didn’t make a sound; it just flailed randomly, like some giant, exposed muscle struck with a doctor’s hammer again and again. Finally, it pulled itself free, retreating back into its tunnel, leaving behind a burned scent of injury and defeat.
But it wasn’t fatally wounded, I somehow knew; it was tougher than that. I swore and fell back on the tracks, shivering.
Lace wrapped her arms around me. “Are you okay? You smell … totally toasted.” She opened my palms, which were black with charred flesh. “Jesus, Cal. You were supposed to let go.”
“Had to kill it!” I managed through electrocution-lockjaw.
“Chill, dude. It’s gone.” She peered up the tunnel. “And there’s a local coming.”
That focused my mind, and we scrambled into the mouth of the thing’s tunnel, pulling out of sight just as the headlights flared around the corner. The train roared past as we cowered together.
“So this is what you feel?” she yelled over the noise. “When you fight those things?”
“Never saw one before,” I said.
“Really? But it felt…” She was breathing deep, her brown eyes wide and gleaming. “It felt like something we were supposed to do. Like that strength you were talking about, when mothers save their kids.”
I nodded. It seemed too soon for Lace, but I couldn’t deny how well she’d fought. The worm and the parasite were connected; maybe seeing the beast had accelerated her change.
Since my first sight of the creature, the puzzles of the last few days had begun to solve themselves in the back of my brain. This invasion, these ancient creatures rising up through the century-old cracks in the city’s sinews—halting it was what the old, cat-vector strain was for. This was why peeps had been created.
There were more of those things down here, I could tell—a plague of worms that humanity had faced before. Lace and Sarah and Morgan and I were only the vanguard; we needed lots of help.
Now I understood what Morgan was doing, spreading the old strain of the parasite, massing a new army to face the coming days. And suddenly I could feel a similar imperative surging through my own body—every bit as strong as the six hundred and twenty-five volts from the third rail—something I had suppressed for six long months.
I took Lace’s hand. “Are you feeling what I’m feeling? A sort of post-battle…”
“Horniness?” she finished. “Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not.” Our lips met again, a kiss as intense as the passing train’s thunder in our ears.
Chapter 24
PARASITES R US
Let us recap:
Parasites are bad.
They suck your blood out of the lining of your stomach. They grow into two-foot-long snakes and roost in the skin of your leg. They infect your cat and then jump up your nose to live in cysts inside your brain, turning you feline-centric and irresponsible. They take over your blood cells in hopes of infecting passing mosquitoes, leaving your liver and brain crumbling from lack of oxygen. They incense your immune system, causing it to destroy your eyeballs. They take terrible advantage of snails and birds and ants and monkeys and cows, stealing their bodies and their food and their evolutionary futures. They almost starved twenty million people in Africa to death.
Basically, they want to rule the world and will crumple whole species like balls of paper and then reshape them in order to carry out their plans. They turn us into walking undead, ravaged hosts that serve only their reproduction.
That’s bad. But…
Parasites are also good.
They have bred howler monkeys to live in peace with one another. Their lousy genes help track the history of the human species. They prevent cows from overgrazing grasslands into windblown deserts. They tame your immune system so it doesn’t destroy your own stomach lining. Then they go and save those twenty million people in Africa, by laying their eggs in those other parasites, the ones trying to starve them.
Which is all quite good, really.
So parasites are bad and good. We depend on them, like all the other checks and balances of the natural world; predators and prey, vegetarians and carnivores, parasites and hosts all need one another to survive.
Here’s the thing: They’re part of the system. Like government bureaucracies with all those forms that have to be filled out in triplicate, they may be a pain, but we’re stuck with them. If every parasite suddenly disappeared from the earth one day, it would be a much bigger disaster than you’d think. The natural order would crumble.
In short, parasites are here to stay, which is a good thing, really. We are what we eat, and we consume them every day, the worms lodged in slices of rare beef or the toxoplasma spores floating up our noses from boxes of cat litter. And they eat us every day too, from ticks sucking our blood to microscopic invaders reshaping our cells. The exchange goes on unendingly, as certain as the earth traveling around the sun.
In a manner of speaking, parasites are us.
Deal with it.
Chapter 25